This week's tentative agreement with the United Auto Workers to cut byhalf the amount of money Chrysler Motors contributes to the unionpension fund was welcome news in a heartland city of 45,000 people. Thenext promising sign for , would be an agreement topartially merge Chrysler with the Italian automaker Fiat. Even then,it's not certain that Kokomo's four big Chrysler plants would be saved.
Called "America's third-fastest dying town" by the influential business magazine in December, Kokomo is in a precarious position asthe 5,000 people who make Chrysler transmissions and engine blocksthere wait to learn their fate. And it doesn't help town spirits thatthe second-biggest employer, Delphi Automotive, laid off 600 workers inKokomo last year and is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Long called Delco,it made radios for General Motors until 1999 and is still the largestsupplier of parts and electronics to that troubled automaker.
Still, it's not all gloom and doom, says Kokomo Mayor Greg Goodnight.
"We'vegone through hard times," he says, "and we've watched our parents gothrough hard times. So we're a pretty strong bunch."
Goodnight, who's 16 months into a job that hasn't exactly been what hethought he was signing up for, adds, "Every day, I feel like I age twodays."
Goodnight is the son of a longtime Teamsters Unionpresident and is himself the former president of a United Steel Workerslocal.
"It's tough all over," he says. "It may be alittle tougher here at times because of the manufacturing base andbecause of Chrysler, specifically. Do I wish they were in a betterposition? Absolutely, but you've just got to deal with what's in frontof you."
At least millions of Americans have heard of Kokomo. Sort of, in the song that goes:
Of course, the Kokomo that everybody knows in that Beach Boys' hit isnot the Indiana manufacturing hub. It was a make-believe bar in theFlorida Keys. Mayor Goodnight knows all too well that the real Kokomois certainly not a place to get away from it all right now.
Oddly situated among the cornfields of northern Indiana, an hour northof the big state capital of Indianapolis, industrial Kokomo has been anauto town for more than a century. Longtime Kokomo newspaper reporterFred Odiet - who's now the county's official historian - says ElwoodHaynes was a chemical engineer who came to town in 1884 to superviseoperations when gas was discovered under nearby fields.
Inorder to supervise, he had to go out to various fields, Odiet notes. He had to go by horseback. Well, he didn't like riding a horse allthat well, so he put his brain to work and came up with what is calledThe Pioneer, which is now in the Smithsonian in Washington. That wasthe first commercially built automobile in the United States.
The four-cylinder Pioneer, which reached a top speed of 12 kilometersper hour, was lightweight. Haynes' associates had equipped it with thefirst-known aluminum engine. Soon Haynes and others established smallauto plants in obscure Kokomo, and the city's automotive heritage wasborn. Over the years, as a Continental Steel mill and smallerfactories failed or moved operations overseas, the city's prosperitywas hitched to Chrysler and Delco.
But instead of sulking, Kokomo appears to be reinventing itself. Mayor Goodnight says his is the first city in the nation that makes itsown biodiesel fuel to power its fleet of 80 fire and trash trucks andbuses. He chuckles as he notes that what the city calls K-Fuel isrecycled from cooking oil contributed by citizens and 20 localbusinesses.
"It's a pleasant french-fry smell!" he jokes "Some days it's chicken nuggets!"
Not really. The only smell is the potential scent of money. Community Development Officer David Galvin says K-Fuel is the firststep in what he calls the greening of the city's business base.
"Chryslerand Delphi and the steel companies in Kokomo have grown with thiscommunity for generations," Galvin says. "We have now reached a pointwhere it is time to change."
Brandon Pitcher, who is the CEO of a zero-emissions consulting firm, has spent10 years talking-up sustainable energy to anyone in Kokomo who willlisten.
"I used to be considered a zealot, crazy, a 'treehugger,'" Pitcher says. "But I really come with a businessbackground. It took the fall of the American automotive industry toget people thinking. When they were thinking they were successful,they weren't thinking very long term, because they were getting a bigpaycheck every week. If you can change these people, and change thisculture, you can't stop us."